From Firefox to Opera back to Firefox.
Am I the only one seeing some heat coming in from the Opera camp? Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what Opera wants to do. On one front, it appears they want to get people to use their browser. While on the other side, they are trying to create a walled garden within their community, assuming trying to create a tighter niche.
Either way, I was curious on some of the new features in Opera, namely this Speed Dial functionality and the announcement of their Del.icio.us eska Opera Link. I wanted to check that out, part of me was hoping for some Del.icio.us integration, too. After all, the best way to get people to convert is not by walling them into your site, but to work with the public sites people already use. I was also curious as to what this “Speed Dial” feature of theirs was.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have much respect for Opera as a browser, itself. But as a long time user of Firefox, I’m use to having my browser integrated with third party sites I use.
So, I decided to give Opera a try. Unfortunately, I only lasted a week before I had to go back to Firefox. Opera is still, in my opinion, not there. Opera, the company, as been extremely resistant in allowing the Opera browser to communicate directly with third party sites. This is still very obvious within their browser.
My disappointments with Opera are simple:
- No Gmail Support — but yet they have no problems with built in Opera Mail support.
- No Del.icio.us support — but they have Opera Link.
- No AdBlock — What can I say? I like a quiet web. Opera’s reasons for not including such a feature is a poor attempt to squirm out of third party add-ons.
- No Inline spell check — I’m a horrible speller, this is a requirement.
That’s all. Simple enough. I like my Gmail Notify within Firefox. But, for the week I was able to deal without it. Del.icio.us support is another one. I was able to last without that support. It wasn’t a big deal since I could still add bookmarks and go to the page just fine. However, things broke down when I hit the limitations of the last two.
No AdBlock…Opera does have content filtering, but it’s not nearly as smart as AdBlock Plus, for Firefox, but it’s there. I used it. I loaded up a pre-built urlfilter list. Things were alright, but I immediately noticed where ads once were and on many occasions, due to the nature of sites I visit (gaming sites), I saw all the ads. The web got noisy again. I lived with it for a bit. It was only a few ads after all. As for smart adBlock within Opera, their suggest route is to use AdMuncher, which is a third party application. It’s not exactly “Opera support” as it’s a proxy; it works cross browser. However, my problem with AdMuncher is that it is not smart enough. It’s not like Firefox where it understands “hey, you actually clicked on that pop-up. You really DO want it.” No, it blocks everything and breaks things.
No inline spell check. Opera claims to have full support of GNU ASpell, but here’s the catch; it’s not a browser feature. GNU ASpell, much like AdMuncher, is a third party application that works across the OS doing spell checks in anything. So in reality, Opera isn’t “supporting” GNU ASpell; it’s merely not preventing such support from working. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to install, yet another, application on my system for a limitation I feel should be within the browser to begin with. In the end, this feature was a bust. I’m such a horrible speller, this is a must have for me, and I know I would not always remember to hit “Check Spelling” every time I made a post. I need something inline, like MS Word, like Firefox, where it would tell me, as I finished typing a word, it was misspelled.
Opera did have some nice perks though. I will hand it to them, Speed Dial is awesome. I loved it. It was a very nice, handy feature I appreciated every time opened up a new tab. I would definitely miss this feature. However, a quick Google resulted in “Speed Dial” a Firefox extension built to replicate Opera’s Speed Dial functionality. Woohoo! Guess I won’t be missing that feature after all.
Another perk of Opera its over all speed. Opera is, no doubt, faster than Firefox. It loads the pages super fast. Opera, given the amount of bloat it has (bloat defined as number of features the general populace would not use), is tremendously fast. On top of being really fast, Opera is definitely much better at memory consumption. After a full week of running, never shutting off Opera, it never went over 100megs. Firefox brakes 100megs in just a few minutes of my browsing. Firefox is currently opened, after 24 hours, with two independent windows, total of 9 tabs, and it’s at 164megs. ugh. Mozilla dudes, fix it!
Anyway, I’m back on Firefox, yet again. If anything, it is because of the add-on functionality allowing me to customize Firefox to suit my needs. Only if Opera would get off their tush and add this option in their browser. I would definitely use it. Or at the least, just check off the above list of mine and I’ll be an Opera user for eternity.
Oh yea and a word to Opera; Nobody likes a walled browser. If your plan is to expand the use of your browser, creating walled content will not work. However, if your plan is to remain centric to your community, go for it! Just don’t be surprised when you don’t gain any significant market share.
